First Crusade Research Paper

Society and Motivations for the First Crusade There has been tension between Western Society and the Islamic world long before attacks from radical Islamic terrorists on western countries but the First Crusade stands as one of the largest conflicts between these cultures. The focus of the conflict was to recapture Jerusalem and other holy sites from Arab and Muslim rule. This paper argues that, although it is generally agreed that religion, particularly forgiveness of sin and eternal life after death, was the primary driving force for the First Crusade, nevertheless, other factors played just as much a role in causing the Crusade because the avarice of knights and nobles and the retaliation of European nation-states to the growing Muslim sphere

Kings would promise land to their dukes, who would promise land to their baron who, in turn, gave land to knights. Land was typically the only thing that knights had to earn money and represented wealth and status in the agrarian economy and peasants would work on the land or in commerce jobs, often mistreated and overtaxed by their Kings and Nobles. Though religious indulgences were advertised by Pope Urban II for fighting to reclaim Jerusalem in The First Crusade, it is evident many crusaders were looking for monetary indulgences instead. In the century leading up to the crusade populations were growing at a rate that nation-states did not have the resources to satisfy increasing populations. Robert the Monk, a man who was at the sermon of Clermont where Pope Urban II gave a rousing call to crusade, writes that Urban says “For this land that you inhabit… is choking under your great multitude. It has no real riches and provides barely enough food for farmers” and even writes that he

Couple this with the fact there was a decreasing amount of work to be found at home and, almost immediately, young men strapped for cash and work took arms and marched east. Noblemen did not have much to worry about when it came to matter of wealth and food but what they lacked in worry was made up for a burning desire to prove themselves of honoring their noble name, typically through battle as was the tradition of most noblemen in medieval society. Many princes answered the call to arms under the guise of honoring their families with honor from the papacy but avarice is not so easily forgotten. When the first wave of the princes’ crusaders arrived in Constantinople, as it was the most common entry point to the Mediterranean for armies, emperor Alexius took note of the greed and was rightly suspicious of Godfrey of Bouillon and the former nobleman Bohemond, who hoped to seize Constantinople seeing it as a natural aim of the journey. Alexius offered them riches and supplies to entice them into making an oath of allegiance which stopped any attack